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| Image Courtesy of IndieWire |
New on Netflix, Radium
Girls tells the true story of watch dial painters in the 1920s who suffered
horrendous illnesses from consuming radioactive material over years of using paint
mixed with radium. The “Undark” paint made watch faces glow in the dark, making
the watches a hot commodity. Despite the passage of the food and drug safety act
in 1906, Radium was being sold in bottles as a wonder drug that could cure
anything from cancer to impotence, while American Radium knew full well the
deadly effects of radiation. The film tells the story of watch painters who
fell ill after consuming large amounts of radium paint from licking
paintbrushes. Directors Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler took this source
material and didn’t do a whole lot with it. Strange pacing, flat characters,
and some quite tone-deaf moments turned a strong story into an hour and forty-two-minute
slog.
The main characters in the film are Bessie
(Joey King) and Josephine (Abby Quinn) who paint watches with Undark in a New Jersey
plant. When Josephine starts to come down with a mysterious illness that doctors
cannot diagnose, they join the Consumer’s League, a group trying to ban
hazardous materials from the workplace. Paula (Olivia Macklin) and Doris (Colby
Minifie), two former radium girls suffering from the same illnesses, share
their testimonials as well in the fight for justice.
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| Image Courtesy of The New York Times |
Despite a large cast of main and side characters, they all tended to feel flat, and underdeveloped. Despite playing an important role in the film, Bessie’s love interest Walt (Collin Kelly-Sordelet), a communist photographer who introduces Bessie to the Consumer’s League, felt more like a tool than a real character. All the personal details we know about him are contained in that single sentence. Bessie learns that he is a communist by catching a glimpse of reams of communist literature in his bag, on which he has a hammer and sickle pin at a time when even a vague association with Marxism was enough to be arrested if not worse. The romance between the two of them feels very forced, as the audience knows so little about both Bessie and Walt that any attempts at tenderness fall entirely flat.
The treatment of the Marxists
that Bessie starts to associate with and whose support she relies on through
the trial felt strange as well. Bessie is invited to the meetings with very little
vetting at a time when communists were considered enemies of the state. It’s no
surprise then, that after inviting strangers into their club and openly wearing
communist pins at work, that their clubhouse is raided by police leading to one
of the most awkward moments in the film. In a jail cell Etta (Susan Heyward) a
black photographer who was working with the communists, tells Bessie about
living in Tulsa and narrowly escaping the massacre to which Bessie pouts about
how unfair the world is, shifting the scene’s attention back to her. Listening
to a white woman pout about the unfairness of the world to a black woman who
just described escaping the worst incidence of racial violence in our nation’s
history struck me as incredibly tone-deaf writing.
The tone the movie took
when dealing with issues of class and race wasn’t the only thing that was off.
The pacing of many important scenes was all over the place. The scenes in court,
meant to be the climax of the movie, were all over the place. The Radium Girls
were giving testimony in court when the camera would inexplicably cut to B-footage
of them leaving the court room, recovered footage of the actual trials, and
seemingly random shots of 1920s cities before returning to the courthouse. What
was meant to be the grand fight against American Radium turned into chaos in
which I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be watching or feeling.
The emotional pacing of
the movie jumped around too. Josephine and Bessie’s fights would be quite
intense, but over in a matter of seconds. The girl’s grandfather who they were
supporting with their factory jobs poised a minor obstacle to their efforts to
find justice as well, but later in the film he apologizes like he was the villain
of the film having a change of heart. Bessie and Walt jump into a relationship
and after a week seem as if they had been together for years. The only consistent
conflict in the film was between the girls and American Radium. All the other
personal drama that could have made the characters interesting and relatable
was stiff and resolved without real conflict.
Although the bones of the
radium girls will glow for thousands of years as the radium lingers in their
bones, this movie didn’t linger in my mind for a thousand seconds after credits
rolled. If you are interested in learning the story of the Radium Girls, a fascinating
and rarely taught chapter in American history, pick up a book such as The
Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore, but
skip this film for either education or entertainment.
